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The Internet is abuzz this morning with news of the first iPhone worm, which comes courtesy of an Australian hacker named “ikee”. Apparently many users woke up to find a picture of Rick Astley’s cold dead eyes staring back at them. Normal iPhone users don’t need to worry too much since the exploit only affects jailbroken iPhone users who have installed SSH.

While SSH access is extremely useful for accessing your iPhone’s file system, it also opens up root access to your iPhone with the default password “alpine”. This news is no failure on Apple’s part, it simply means jailbreakers need to be more aware of the security holes they’re opening up with unauthorized software. Having recently started dabbling with jailbreaking myself, one of the first things I did was change my root password. Here are instructions how using a Cydia terminal app.

A blogger named JD has an interview with the hacker which took place over IRC. It appears that he didn’t expect the virus to become as widespread as it has, especially since he only infected a few phones initially. This speaks to the pandemic-like nature of worms and viruses–they sometimes explode long before we realize what’s happening. Luckily this particular hack seems easy to remove, and prevention is also fairly simple. It all comes down to one of the most basic IT security tenets–always change your default passwords.

[Source: TUAW]